memcached 1.4.0 released

Published
July 10, 2009

So, word is getting around that memcached 1.4 has shifted from release candidate to release! Twitter was all abuzz yesterday. New in this release: binary protocol, performance improvements, new statistics and new CAS operations among others.

There are a couple of good sized sites running the release candidate in production, and I'm sure more will jump in soon. You can find the details in the memcached release notes. The release notes are well written and worth a read, but they're particularly interesting to some of us at NorthScale. Why? This release includes work proposed way back at the first memcached hackathon hosted at Facebook. Dustin was at that hackathon and yesterday he recalled for me how some of the new features came about. For instance, one large arc which started then is the binary protocol. It had been bantered about on the list and in subsequent hackathons, and is now in a dot-even release (which in memcached parlance is a production release) along with the other features covered in the release notes. To me personally, this release is of special interest. My little patch has qualified me to join my other NorthScale colleagues, Dustin and Steve, as a code contributor along with the core contributors I've known for some time: dormando, Toru Maesaka, Trond Norbye, Brian Aker... so many others to list. It should get more interesting from here as people wade in and start using the new functionality in the server and the updated clients. If nothing else, those running at the extremes, may see their sites runs just a little bit faster. We hope to see either your kudos or questions on the list!